Education
Studio Gang’s Kresge College Addition Nestles Wood Construction in Forested Landscape
Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz remains a signature project in the portfolio of distinguished architectural collaborators Charles Moore and William Turnbull.
Designed and built between 1966 (just a year after the first phase of their iconic Sea Ranch community, designed with Donlyn Lyndon and Joseph Esherick opened) and 1974, the initial residential college created a festive postmodern “street” nestled under a canopy of California redwoods about 75 miles south of San Francisco. The drama of the setting is only enhanced by a 50-foot slope over the eight-acre site.
But after 50 years, the housing shortage that has hit college campuses across the U.S. was also felt at Kresge. Cue Chicago-based Studio Gang, which, in 2023, added to the architectural caliber of the site with three new residence halls and the 37,000-square-foot Kresge College Academic Center—all designed and built using hybrid structures of mass timber, concrete, and light-frame construction.
UCSC Kresge College
“Our goal was to add new qualities to the sense of place offered by Moore and Turnbull’s design, rather than to replicate the architecture,” Studio Gang Founding Principal and Partner Jeanne Gang says. “We wanted our expansion to retain the qualities of surprise and free-spiritedness that have defined Kresge College, while at the same time opening it up to students of all abilities, the incredible natural ecology of its site, and the larger university community beyond.”
“Moore’s design was so internally focused on the street that, 50 years later, we heard a lot from the students that they actually felt like it turned its back on the environment,” University of California, Santa Cruz Director of Physical and Environmental Planning Jolie Kerns says. “A lot of what we talked about with Gang’s addition is how to flip it outward and start to re-engage with the natural environment and open Kresge up.”
UCSC Kresge College
UCSC Kresge College
UCSC Kresge College
Nimble Wood Construction Emphasizes Natural Connections
The structures are among the first CLT higher-education buildings constructed in California, according to the architects. Magnusson Klemencic Associates provided structural engineering for the project. The Seattle-based firm has extensive experience in mass timber, having designed over 25 buildings with the material in recent years. “The use of mass timber reflects the ecology of the environment where this building is located,” Senior Design Engineer Alex Wilson says. Mass timber provided benefits on the small, constricted site during construction—including requiring a smaller crew for erection.
The new academic center sits at the north end of the site, with the three new residence halls located to the west of the original complex.
The academic center is dubbed the ACAD building and provides a combination of lecture halls, classrooms, and offices that serve the entire Kresge College community. It sits on a two-story concrete podium with concrete shear walls and a lateral system, transitioning to mass timber above the ground floor. The roof comprises curved glulam elements and CLT, most of which is exposed.
The three five-story-tall residence halls each have a concrete podium that supports a light-frame wood structure above, with CLT floors and roofs, and glulam beams in select locations. Each residence hall is organized around a double-loaded corridor, and each five-story-tall mass is kinked in plan, bending around existing groves of redwood trees. Where the original Moore and Turnbull campus stresses hard-edged angular forms, Studio Gang’s new, more curvilinear interventions lend softness.
UCSC Kresge College
UCSC Kresge College
Enhancing Light-Frame With Exposed Mass Timber
While the mass timber may draw the most attention, all four new buildings also employ light-frame wood construction extensively. “They’re what you would typically see on a five-on-two type of construction,” Wilson says. But “for the most part, anything that’s exposed is mass timber—either CLT or glulam,” he adds.
Kerns adds that the exposed mass timber helped meet the goal of connecting occupants with the surrounding environment: “Allowing it to be the finished material on the interior certainly seemed to allow the concept [of the complex] to come through really strongly.”
While Studio Gang pointedly eschews the Pop and Op Art-inspired postmodernism of the original Moore and Turnbull designed college, the newly expanded complex maintains a high level of playfulness through its layered use of mass timber and conventional wood framing. “We really wanted to create a compliment to the original architecture so that people would come and visit to see Studio Gang’s evolution of those ideas and create something different that still had the original spirit,” Kerns says.
“I think they did that,” she adds. “And CLT was a big part of that.”
